5. Fanny Burney's Evelina. That one just got set on a shelf and forgotten. Oops. There's still time, anyway.

6. and 7. A couple of foreign language books, one a Russian kids' novel (if I'm guessing right from the cover and title), titled Kanykuli v stranye skazok, which I think translates to "Tale of a vacation in the country" or something like that. I know less Russian than I used to, and I never knew much. The second is an English-Arabic picture dictionary, which I've never been able to make sense of.

...and that's all I've got. Most of the other unread or half-read books on my shelf were either inherited (sorry, Mark Twain, I haven't read every one of the almost-complete set of your novels yet) or given to me (you know how sometimes people give you books they think will benefit your worldview? They never seem to try fiction. But if I'm not interested in the worldview, and it's also not a good novel, it's a lot less likely to come off my shelf. :P)

With apologies to George--very many books of sermons and other such didactic texts. There was a time in my life when I tried very hard to convince myself that I enjoyed reading sermons...

But we've had to slim down our library so much what with moving around, all the books I now have are books I want to or need to pick up and read. (The sermon books have been mostly given away or sold.)

I have that same problem with Walden, though. You should ask people to list books that they think they ought to like, but just can't (or have you done that already?). That would be something...

Lol, my family doesn't buy me books I haven't told them to get me :) but my friends try it sometimes, though it's worked out pretty well most of the time. I'm so jealous of you for not making it to 10! I can only imagine what that would be like..

Mr. Pond, no apologies necessary. Sermons are an interesting thing. Written down but meant to be received in an auditory fashion. Instructive & didactic but also meant to expound & open up Holy Scripture & also, as hard as it might be to believe at times, a vehicle of the Holy Spirit. And sermons aren't necessarily meant to be enjoyable in the sense of entertainment or even of light reading. They're supposed to give us, in a sense, something to chew on.

Haha, Masha--like you, I've found that attempts to read everything in any given section are doomed to failure. Although I may have read just about every horse book the Bozeman Public Library had when I was a kid. :)

I do actually intend to read Walden someday. It just needs a little priority! My to-read list is out of control right now.

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